6 HubSpot Fall 2024 New Features Worth Using

In the fall of 2024, HubSpot announced over 200 feature updates, and while we think they were liberal with how they defined a “feature” (there’s no way there are 200 things worth talking about), there were some promising updates we tested out. 

Here’s a rundown of our favorite new HubSpot beta releases and their most promising use cases for B2B marketers.

Lead Scoring

HubSpot’s new Breeze AI features include tools like lead scoring, multi-step forms, and content remixing. The lead scoring tool is a notable improvement over the default contact and company scoring properties that were HubSpot’s previous answer to lead scoring.

The original contact and company scoring options didn’t update automatically and were a simple, logic-based point system based on actions taken at the person or account level. This scoring method also didn’t allow for a time decay or multiple points allocated for a single action. 

For example, if a person visited your website, it was allocated points for visiting once and never again. No matter how many months ago that interaction took place. Is anyone else thinking of the tried and true sales motto, “Time kills all deals”?

The lead scoring feature has fit and engagement elements determining a lead score. The fit portion allows HubSpot customers to select criteria manually or calculate fit based on historically closed won deals.

Before you run to your HubSpot instance to turn on that automatic fit calculation, there are two things to keep in mind. An automated fit score is only helpful if you have a crystal clear ideal customer profile or a lot of won deals to analyze. If you’re an early-stage company that has yet to dial in product-market fit or your product has a wide array of use cases, that automated fit score won’t ring true with your sales team.

And if your sales team refuses to use the score, what’s the point?

The engagement portion of the score is a noticeable improvement from the old method of scoring in HubSpot. The new tool gives you very granular channel options, interaction choices, and time decay.

Sounds great, right? It’s still very manual and doesn’t offer up activities proactively that the data says are correlated with successful deals.

Marketer beware. It’s easy to fall into the over-engineering trap that has caused many sales organizations to ignore lead scores and MQLs. In order to be an effective qualification tool, your scores need to be simple to explain and understand.

We’ll repeat it with feeling: If your sales team refuses to use the score, what’s the point?

Breeze Intelligence

Breeze Intelligence was covered in great detail in this video, with a full write-up. The TL; DR version shows that Breeze Intelligence has three use cases today. Here’s what we think about them:

1. Breeze Enrichment – 😊 – Finally, built-in enrichment making 3rd party data providers obsolete. It’s a good way to enrich event attendees lists. Functionality options are still raw, but I expect to see more configuration options added soon.
2. Breeze Intent – 😆 – Breeze Intent allows marketers to define a target audience and use first-party web data to flag people who are engaged with your brand. Free, quick setup, easy win. We like it!
3. Breeze Form Shortening – 😐 – If you don’t mind sacrificing the ability to customize your forms with code, this is an OK feature. However, form shortening only pulls data for contacts (not companies) and doesn’t reference your existing database. We see potential, but we’re not convinced it’s worth the money yet.

Breeze Copilot and Agents

The AI Copilot in HubSpot is a virtual assistant helping with tasks like drafting emails. This tool is familiar to those who’ve used similar features in platforms like Microsoft’s Copilot.

We see (and agree with) a lot of chatter on LinkedIn about how terrible AI-generated cold prospecting email content is and why this form of scaling prospecting hurts those of us trying to reach our target audience. Make sure your team isn’t mindlessly sending out AI-generated emails. Remember, AI can’t recognize sarcasm or separate fact from fiction. 

Additionally, HubSpot has introduced prospecting and social agents, which automate aspects of lead prospecting and social media management, providing a scalable approach for marketers.

As a best practice, test agents internally before you unleash them on your customer base. It’s also advisable to test how your agent manages a request to talk to a person, which we consistently find to be the most frustrating phase of any AI-driven or manually automated interaction. 

Content Remix

The Content Remix feature is interesting for social media marketers and content marketers. Users can upload long-format content (e.g., webinars), which HubSpot will break down into short clips, blog posts, emails, and social media posts. 

This tool accelerates content repurposing, offering a quick way to create drafts for multiple platforms. It may provide a good outline or even some solid paragraphs, but we recommend posting this content after thoroughly reviewing it for accuracy and tone.

As a rule, we aim for at least 20% productivity gains to consider a product worth using. Our content marketers use generative AI tools here at Airfleet but have found the most significant gains in synthesizing content experts generate, recommending edits, and providing an article structure that supports our SEO goals.

Multi-Step Forms

With multi-step forms in beta, HubSpot users can split longer forms into steps to make them less intimidating. 

We like this feature for survey-format questionnaires. Breaking questions into multiple screens makes the experience more manageable than a long page of questions presented all at once. This feature is also handy for ABM campaigns where personalization is critical. Logic-based customization within forms lets marketers tailor questions based on a contact’s previous responses. 

However, marketers should note the current lack of custom code support for styling, which limits brand customization options.

The new form editor is heavily featured in our Breeze Intelligence review, and we recommend watching that video if you’re curious about form shortening.

Our Top Integration Pick: Amplitude

If you use Amplitude to analyze product or in-app data, HubSpot’s integration offers an interesting way to view and leverage user behavior data. This is valuable for Product-Led Growth (PLG) strategies, helping marketers target users based on product interaction data. It’s great for upselling and prioritizing outreach to free or trial-tier users who show high intent.

Want to learn more about the new HubSpot features we haven’t mentioned here? Check out their Fall 2024 Spotlight here, and be sure to subscribe to our newsletter to stay up to date on the latest and greatest!